Guide
Moving your Money data into Quicken or GnuCash
Neither program can open a .mny file, and no plug-in makes them.
The move always goes through an interchange format — here is which one to pick, and an
honest account of what survives the trip.
Why there is no direct import
A .mny file is an encrypted Microsoft Jet database in the MSISAM variant.
Quicken, GnuCash, HomeBank and Moneydance all expect an interchange file — QIF, OFX or CSV —
and none of them contains a decryptor for Money's format. That is not a gap in those
programs; it is simply not their job.
So every route that works has the same two steps: get the data out of Money into an open format, then import that.
Step one, the free version
If you have a Windows machine, install Money Plus Sunset — Microsoft's own free release, no activation — open your file and export what you need. For one account over a couple of years this is a perfectly good answer and it costs nothing.
It becomes impractical at scale. You are exporting a report at a time, by hand, and the export options were thin even when Money was current.
Step one, without Windows or by the whole file
Microsoft Money Rescue reads the
.mny directly on your own machine — Windows or Mac — and writes QIF, OFX and CSV
in one run, along with a report of what came out. It covers
Money 2001 to Money Plus 2008. Money 2000 is not supported.
Which format should you pick?
| Destination | Use |
|---|---|
| Quicken | QIF for historical import; OFX where your version prefers it |
| GnuCash | QIF — GnuCash's importer handles it well and lets you map accounts as it goes |
| HomeBank, Moneydance | QIF |
| Excel, Numbers, your own records | CSV |
A note on Quicken specifically: its handling of QIF has varied a lot between versions and editions, and some import historical QIF only into certain account types. Check what your edition does before you plan the whole migration around it. We would rather flag that than have you discover it at step two.
What survives the move, and what does not
The interchange formats are older and simpler than either database, so some detail is lost in the middle regardless of which tool you use. Being straight about it:
| Comes across | Does not |
|---|---|
| Accounts, with name, type and opening balance | Split-transaction detail lines — not decoded |
| The full transaction ledger — dates, amounts, memos, cleared status | Per-holding investment quantities |
| Payees and the full category tree | Investment positions and trades — investment accounts export as cash ledgers in QIF |
| Securities — name, ticker, last price | Payee postal addresses |
If your Money file leans heavily on split transactions or detailed investment tracking, read that right-hand column carefully before you buy anything. Run the free preview on your own file first and see what it reports.
A sensible order of work
- Copy your
.mnysomewhere safe first. Everything below works on a copy. - Export to QIF and CSV in the same run — QIF for the new program, CSV as a plain archive that will still be readable in twenty years whatever software exists then.
- Import the QIF into your new program and check a handful of known transactions against the old file before trusting it.
- Keep the original
.mnyand the CSV. Storage is cheap; re-creating records from bank statements is not.
Microsoft Money Rescue opens your original read-only and never writes to it, including its modification time, so step one stays intact whatever happens later.
See what is in your file before you pay anything
You can run Microsoft Money Rescue against your own
.mny file and see on screen what it finds — the accounts, how many transactions,
the date range — before deciding whether it is worth £39 to you. Saving that out to
files is what the licence unlocks; looking is free.